Yonatan Mendel How can you kill 16 Palestinians and hold Hamas responsible?
How can you kill 16 Palestinians and hold Hamas responsible?
The entire triumvirate of the government, the army and most of the media in Israel wanted Israeli citizens not to think of the demonstration as a demonstration, and not to see the demonstrators as demonstrators but as Hamas members. Television program Fauda and the Arabic language have helped prepare the hearts and minds.
The IDF’s psychological warfare unit evidently worked overtime in the days leading up to the demonstration, aiming at two main target audiences: the besieged residents of Gaza, and Jewish citizens of Israel who were searching for reasons not to see or hear. One of the methods that proved most effective in permitting the killing, and legitimising it in advance, were the Arabic language messages that were sent on to Gazans but were intended for Israelis at least as much.
The video in Arabic that the IDF prepared for Gaza residents begins as follows: "Protest march? Popular demonstrations? Provocation!" ("مسيرة احتجاج؟ مظاهرات شعبية؟ استفزاز!). That was followed by Hamas leader Ismail Radouan talking about the March of Return" and then the pivotal IDF slogan "No return - but anarchy" appears on the screen ((In Arabic it rhymes - Mish aouda - Fauda"مش عودة – فوضى! ").) This dismissive slogan was chosen to pull the the authenticity of the demonstrations apart and remove the fact that behind them stands a community which feels committed to the burning Palestinian issues – from Land Day and the Right of Return to ending the siege and ending the Occupation.
Following that, and according to the rules of the Shin Bet and the psychological warfare of Israelis that lies deep within every viewer of Fauda, the Palestinians are held responsible: The video calls on the citizens of Gaza to rise up against their leadership, which is, as is well known, responsible for the situation of the Palestinians - "a leadership that instead of focusing on issues of unemployment, water, the electricity and the sewerage system in Gaza calls on them to go and risk their lives." The slogans in the video continue to flow, with dramatic music and Israeli Hasbara messages in Arabic: “This is not a popular demonstration! And not a protest demonstration! It's a provocation!”
The same message came out of the Twitter account of Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and in Arabic, of course:
📷
الى سكان قطاع غزة :
قيادة حماس تغامر في حياتكم. كل من يقترب من الجدار يعرض حياته للخطر. انصحكم مواصلة حياتكم العادية والطبيعية وعدم المشاركة في الاستفزاز.
(In Hebrew: To the residents of Gaza: The Hamas leadership is endangering your lives, and anyone who approaches the fence will put himself at risk and I recommend that you maintain your ordinary normal life and not participate in a provocation.)
And if there is a need for a third angle, these messages of the IDF and the defence minister in Arabic were very similar to the "letter" in ידיעות אחרונות Yedioth Ahronoth (in Hebrew and Arabic) that Ben-Dror Yemini addressed to the demonstrators in Gaza (“Hamas is responsible, not Israel” ). There, Yemini also followed on from the Israeli Hasbara messages and stated that “you are marching into crisis. But not because of Israel. Because of the Hamas regime. Hamas knows how to invest - but only in the death industry.”
The Israeli security-propaganda discourse has been increasingly talking in Arabic, and it is not difficult to see why. This technique makes it possible to kill two birds with one stone: it succeeds very effectively in serving as domestic Hasbara, since things are translated into Hebrew and make us feel much better because we tried to warn, we said in advance that this is not our responsibility, so it is probably not our responsibility. In other words: We prepared hearts and minds for the killing that is about to come, and to come out of Israel's guns, but only because of Hamas and because of the Palestinians and because of the Gazans, not because of Israel.
In addition, this technique is also used as psychological warfare externally, at least in terms of the Israeli hope that the Palestinians will come rise up against their leadership, adopting the Israeli view that without Hamas there would be no Occupation, and without Hamas there would be no siege and without Hamas there would be a just solution to the refugee issue. It would seem, then, that the spectrum of the Israeli discourse is identical to the distance between Yedioth Ahronoth and the Defence Minister. In any case, it mainly caused all of us to repeat again and again the same mantras, which are intended, at the end of the day, to give the Jews of Israel a superior sense of morality. An important principle in the process of wiping out the Palestinians, erasing their faces and their story, one that can prepare the hearts and minds, and burnish the conscience for a country that kills 16 demonstrators, living in a narrow strip under siege, and must carry on nonchalantly through the holiday.
“Not a return - but Fauda” as Israeli contempt for the Palestinians
There is a lot to say about this propaganda campaign by the IDF, the Ministry of Defence, Ben-Dror Yemini and others in the Israeli media, who “predicted” the violence in the demonstration and served as an excuse for legitimating the killings in advance. It is important to emphasise the hegemonic discourse in Israel that the military, leadership, security apparatus and the media have a major role in shaping, and according to which Gaza is no longer our problem. In other words, the problem of Gaza began and ended with the settlements, and once Israel evacuated the settlements, all of Gaza's problems were solved.
This is a false narrative that deliberately ignores the fact that the Palestinians living in Gaza are an inseparable part of the Palestinian people and that the problems that began in 1948 (70 per cent of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees who lived inside pre-1967 Israel), or are due to the occupation that began in 1967, or due to the naval and air blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza, and the land blockade imposed on Gaza by agreement and coordination between Israel and Egypt - all these problems are primarily related to Israel. They are part of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as long as the conflict continues, the lie that “we left Gaza” and now they are no longer our problem, is both outrageous and blinding.
In addition, the slogan "not a Return but a fauda" has a great deal of contempt for the Palestinian political history and position, and it also bears witness to Israel's inability (and it goes without saying – unwillingness) to see the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as human beings. To see them really, without the help of Israeli propaganda. To see them as people whose life as refugees is neither a joke nor a plot, nor a lie, nor an invention. They really are human beings. And they really live under siege. And they are really part of the Palestinian people. And they are, for the most part, refugees who during the 1948 war fled/were expelled from their homes and who were not allowed to return to their homes after the war. Most of all, their political problem, despite all the stories we tell ourselves, is still our problem.
Therefore, in order to give a face to the names, and especially to turn the IDF mantra of “no return but a fauda” on its head, I’m publishing here the names of the 16 who were killed yesterday in Gaza without having any information about where each of them was killed, whether they raised a flag or a poster, or a stone, or a weapon, and without knowing exactly which branch of the family the specific person came from, I will try to cling to their family name to locate the origin of the family, to emphasise the simple fact that the people there, which we do not see or hear, even if they support Hamas and Fatah, and whether they are heroes or cowards, smart or stupid, they were and remained, at least until the end of the conflict, part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Give some of the political problem rests primarily at our doorstep, not Hamas's doorstep:
Abdul-Qader Merdhi al-Hawajri, 42, belonged to a family that originally lived in the village of Barir in the south of the country.
Naji Abdullah Abu Hjeir,belonged to a Bedouin family, part of the Hanjara tribe, which was one of the seven tribes of the Bedouin of the Negev (the Arabs of Beersheba") before 1948.
Amin Mansour Abu Moammar, 22, was also from a Bedouin family, part of the Al-Janabib tribe, which still lives in Israel. The members of the tribe were transferred during the period of the military government from the Ovdat area where they lived prior to 1948 to the Tel Arad area in which they live today.
Mahmoud Sa'adi Rahmi, 33, is originally from a Gazan family.
Wahid Nasrallah Abu Samur, 27, was a member of a family from the village of Qaratiya in the Nahal Lachish area, which was destroyed in 1948 and the villagess of Revaha, Komemiyut and Shahar were established on its lands.
Muhammad Na'im Abu 'Amru, 27, belonged to a family from the village of al-Khadita, which was located in the Lyd (Lydda/Lod) district of Ben Shemen, and on whose agricultural land Hadid was built.
Ahmad Ibrahim Ashur 'Odeh, 16, is a member of the' Odeh family, one of whom is from the family in Nazareth and another in Jaffna.
Jihad Ahmad Freina, 34, is from a family of refugees from the town of Hamama in the Ashdod region, on whose ruins Kibbutz Nitzanim and Moshav Beit Ezra were established.
Muhammad Kamal al-Najjar is originally from a Gazan family.
Sari Walid Abu 'Odeh is a member of a family of refugees who lived in the town of Hamama in the Isdud/Ashdod area before 1948.
'Abd al-Fatah' Abd al-Nabi, 18, was a member of a family from the town of al-Faluja, whose name was preserved at the "Plugot Junction" and on whose land the town of Kiryat Gat was built.
Ibrahim Salah Abu Sha'ar, 22, belonged to a family that lived in the township of al-Majdal, on which the city of Ashkelon was established.
Bader al-Fatt al-Zubar is originally from a Gazan family.
Hamdan Isma'il Abu 'Amseh was a member of a family that lived in the town of Saqm, located southeast of Tiberias. On its ruins, the Tzemach Regional Centre was established.
Jihad Zahir Abu Jamus, 30, was the son of a family of refugees from the village of Beit Dajan, southeast of Jaffa, now known as Beit Dagan.
Omar Wahid Samur, 30, is from a family in the Palestinian village of Na'alya, on which the Agamim neighbourhood in Ashkelon was built
Translated by Yoni Molad for the Middle East News Service edited by Sol Salbe, Melbourne, Australia.
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